Assistant Professor of Law
B.A. University of Texas at Austin
J.D. Yale Law School
Deepa Varadarajan joins the St. John’s faculty as an Assistant
Professor of Law. She teaches Property, Introduction to
Intellectual Property, and Patent Law.
Before coming to St. John’s, Professor Varadarajan taught federal
pretrial litigation and legal research and writing at Stanford Law
School. Professor Varadarajan’s research spans several areas,
including intellectual property, cultural property, property
theory, and the intersections of IP, human rights, and economic
development. Her work explores whether and how intellectual
property law can facilitate or impede economic development, and the
law's impact on traditional cultures and innovation systems.
Professor Varadarajan received her B.A., summa cum laude,
from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000 and her J.D. from
Yale Law School in 2003.While at Yale, she was an editor of the
Yale Law Journal and co-editor of the Yale Human
Rights & Development Law Journal. She clerked for the
Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
and the Honorable Charles P. Sifton of the U.S. District Court for
the Eastern District of New York. Professor Varadarajan was a
litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP, where her
practice covered a broad variety of commercial disputes, including
patent and intellectual property litigation, antitrust litigation,
and disputes over the ownership of artwork.
Selected Publications:
A Trade Secret Approach to Protecting Traditional
Knowledge, 36 YALE J. INT’L L. 372 (2011).
Billboards and Big Utilities: Borrowing Land Use Concepts
to Regulate ‘Nonconforming’ Sources Under the Clean Air Act,
112 YALE L. J. 2553 (2003).
Tortious Interference and the Law of
Contract: The Case for Specific Performance Revisited,
111 YALE L.J. 735 (2001).